Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Development boosters like to claim a purported synthesis of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, with even a priority to the former. "We plan on a Robert Moses sort of scale, at least a number of these rezonings," claimed City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden in July 2010, "but we judge ourselves by a Jane Jacobs scale." “It may surprise some given my developer DNA, that I identify more with Jane Jacobs than Robert Moses,” declared Forest City Ratner CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin last May. However, Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of  The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs , has warned that Moses's "ends justify the means" philosophy was fundamentally antithetical to Jacobs's respect for process, and that it's impossible to merge the two. So it was astounding to hear Gilmartin-- one of the two developers on Mayor Bill de Blasio's transition team --claim, as described below, that building modular apartments...

The Real Deal, on 12/1/13, published  De Blasio’s short list for real estate jobs: As inauguration day nears, sources point to the contenders to take over posts key to the industry . The lead: Indeed, on the short list for chair of the Department of City Planning (which arguably has the most direct impact on the real estate business) are three people who are on the 13-member City Planning Commission now under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, according to several industry sources. The candidates mentioned to The Real Deal are: Anna Hayes Levin, Michelle de la Uz and Kenneth Knuckles. “The changes are not going to be nearly as great as people assume,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank, who worked on Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign. ...The [transition] team, which was announced last month and also includes developer Douglas Durst and Forest City Ratner CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin, is expected to start naming commissioners in early D...

The  Municipal Art Society , the venerable urbanist organization whose  critique  of Atlantic Yards still stands in many ways (though MAS by 2010  left  the Brooklyn Speaks coalition it helped found), is giving the Barclays Center an award as "Neighborhood Catalyst," part of its  2013 MASterworks Awards , at a ceremony today. This annual juried award is "for a project that has been a catalyst for change in its neighborhood." The awards "celebrate excellence in architecture and urban design in New York City and recognize the best projects, completed within the last year, that have made significant contributions to the built environment of the city."  Misguided award However the Barclays Center may be worthy of distinction, I believe that the "Neighborhood Catalyst" award is badly misguided, given: the arena's mixed record in its immediate neighborhood, with rising commercial rents (bringing new tenants but also ejecting others), im...

From today's New York Times Real Estate section, High-Rises to Replace an East Side Eyesore: Countless New Yorkers have driven by the construction rubble that lines the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive from East 35th Street to East 41st... Now the first shovels have hit the ground, and the block-front on First Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets will soon be transformed into two curving, copper-clad residential towers, creating some 800 new high-end rental units. ...“This area hasn’t seen any great architecture since the development of the United Nations” in 1947, said Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP Architects, which is responsible for both exteriors and interiors in the project. “This could be a harbinger of things to come in terms of getting more innovative design along the East River.” The two buildings bend and connect via a sky bridge, billed as the showstopper, which will feature an indoor lap pool and a lounge area... “The buildings are modern and fresh,” Mr. Chakrab...

A slide from a Chakrabarti lecture In his new book A Country of Cities  and in a series of lectures, Vishaan Chakrabarti--architect, planner, academic, and businessman (partner in SHoP)--makes a compelling case for a more dense America. In that America, subsidies and unwise spending are steered away from suburbia and toward public transit and other urban infrastructure, and people live not in McMansions but in towers. The "high-low" city? But it is strange--and quite ahistorical--that Chakrabarti deems Atlantic Yards and the Barclays Center exemplars of what he calls the "high-low" city, melding high rises with more modest structures, and maintaining urbanity with crucial open space like plazas. The Barclays Center plaza is an accident, though it goes unmentioned in the book. There was supposed to have been an office tower, which original architect Frank Gehry called "Miss Brooklyn," at that plaza. The tower was supposed to rise some 620 feet...